TRANSPOWER: crafting a fortress of resistance

May 8, 2018

nothing in my life as an organizer has changed as dramatically as deeply internalizing the centrality of extending practical solidarity to trans women of color—nothing in the self-proclaimed equality movement needs to be rejected as emphatically as the tokenizing and exploitive ploys of gay inc towards the most marginalized sectors of our community…the refrain that “they only care about us when we die” has fallen on willfully dismissive ears—the capitalist pride industrial complex seems to believe that simply throwing letters into an acronym makes us a community…this when affluent cis gay white men are active agents of gentrification: displacing low income people of color from neighborhoods they have called home for generations…addicted to the delusion producing drug of rainbow bliss, all too many are shocked, and often combative, when their annual celebrations of how fabulous it is to by gay are met by protests led by communities left behind and thrown under the bus…we must craft a new matrix of liberation: expanding upon the foundations laid by the trans women who lit the fuse that became the stonewall rebellion…we must imagine a day when trans folk will be celebrated for their beauty, brilliance, and courage—we must make our solidarity practical: crafting a fortress of resistance—or, to deploy another mixed metaphor, a lighthouse with sacred fires burning in the harbors we build against the sea storm of anti-trans bigotry…practical solidarity: extending housing and hospitality for sex workers, demanding affirmative action in employment, and re-educating the public about the toxicity of transmysoginy and transphobia…i am permanently in awe of the strength of character required to reject a gender assigned at birth and craft a new and transformed identity from the inadequate social models permitted by this insidious system…we must build community that can create space for trans folk to transform histories of trauma into scars that heal: evolving over time into platinum armor steeled for our looming and over-ripe revolution…intersectionality, radical imagination, and anticapitalist praxis offer a scaffolding for the work to come…we must imagine a world where gender will be as fluid, or as fixed, as anyone of us so desires—we must imagine a transcendent future whose arsenal of pronouns haven’t even been invented…